Google Cloud adds Confluent, MongoDB and other open-source projects as managed services

They'll be treated as 'equal collaborators not a resource to be mined' Google promises .

Confluent, the company founded by the creators of the Apache Kafka streaming data platform, announced last week that its Confluent Cloud for Apache Kafka is to be available natively on the Google Platform.

In a blog post, CEO Jay Kreps said the move will including integration with core Google services for easier management and billing, allowing customers to take advantage of other services on GCP while only paying for what they use. Kreps added that Confluent Cloud is cloud native, i.e. designed to be deployed to the cloud rather than on-premises infrastructure, and thus avoids some of the compromises inherent in adapting software to run in the cloud.

"This benefits both our cloud customers, who get new features at the pace they'd expect out of a SaaS solution, as well as our on-prem customers, who get features that are battle-tested at really large scale on our cloud platform," he said.

Google is integrating other "open-source-centric" projects into GCP too. These include DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis.

"We've always seen our friends in the open-source community as equal collaborators, and not simply a resource to be mined. With that in mind, we'll be offering managed services operated by these partners that are tightly integrated into Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing a seamless user experience across management, billing and support," the company said in a blog.

However, relations between cloud giants and open source projects have not always been amicable, and Google's tone is telling. Last year Redis, MongoDB and Confluent brought in restrictive licensing on some modules to prevent what they saw as unfair exploitation of their code by the hosts.

Gaetan Castelein, VP of product marketing at Confluent, told Computing that no additional licensing changes had been made and the Confluent Community License remains in place.

Asked whether similar partnerships are planned with other cloud platforms, Castelein said: "Today Confluent Cloud is already available on Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, and we are exploring options to make it available across more cloud platforms. With this latest announcement, we are making it easier for customers to consume Confluent Cloud as a native service on GCP."

Google also announced new capabilities for high-perfornance computing on GCP, including Compute-Optimised VMs and Memory-Optimised VMs and the general availability of T4 GPUs.